


Ill-flowered

by Isagawa



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: (badly - that's the word), (sorry), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And I'm only posting it now, But less tragic than the original AU I guess, Give Kageyama Tobio A Boyfriend, Hanahaki Disease, I'm Chaotic Evil™ when it comes to fanfic publication, M/M, Pining, Translation, Unrequited Love, no polyamory, tbh this is just an excuse to write about Tobio's crushes and how he handles them, written as part of my NaNoWriMo 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 18:30:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13487247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isagawa/pseuds/Isagawa
Summary: "The day Kageyama starts spitting white petals, he nearly faints, holds on to his bathroom wall and thinks he is going to throw up.These flowers are narcissus. Narcissus poeticus, from the family of the Liliaceae; he had taped some up in an herbarium, in primary school.He knows very well who they are addressed to, why they appeared."Hanahaki Disease: where the victim regurgitates and coughs up flower petals when they suffer from unrequited love.





	Ill-flowered

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Mal fleuri par l’automne](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13486914) by [Isagawa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isagawa/pseuds/Isagawa). 



> The French version of this fanfic (which I also wrote- I'm a French-native speaker and this is just a translation) was my first time writting in the HQ!! fandom. I'm *quite* nervous about it (and wanna know really bad whether you liked it or not & whether there still are grammar mistakes or not!)  
> Title comes from Oliver Bernard's translation of Apollinaire's "Autumn Crocuses" (here: http://www.artofeurope.com/apollinaire/apo4.htm)

The day Kageyama starts spitting white petals, he nearly faints, holds on to his bathroom wall and thinks he is going to throw up. He thinks so, for throwing up doesn’t seem so bad -draining away something that will then be forever out of you and won’t bother you again- compared to the very clear-cut impression he is going to die.   
He doesn’t die.   
Instead, the twelve-year-old boy does some research. These immaculate petals, always coming by six and sometimes covered with little pollen, are narcissus. Narcissus poeticus, from the family of the Liliaceae; he had taped some up in an herbarium, in primary school.  
He knows very well who they are addressed to, why they appeared. 

He grits his teeth and goes to the trainings with his gaze down, breathes as little as possible, tosses balls in quasi-apnea; holds back his cough as best as he can. One day, he feels sick and misses training. The feeling of solitude, of being a good-for-nothing, is so strong that he tells himself he’d rather throw up, die even, rather than miss volley again.   
Some other day, he coughs and keeps his mouth firmly closed, so much that a petal pokes out of his nose. No one has seen it. He tears it off, crumples it, lets it discreetly fall to the ground; mortified.   
On another day, the cough is so strong he feels it coming before it’s even there; feels the itching at the bottom of his lungs, where the ill forms and will asphyxiate him one day; he raises his hand in the middle of a set and asks if he may go to the bathroom. He tries to ignore the coach’s perplexed look, when he quietly agrees. He runs, slams the door shut and, his hands gripping the washbasin, spits out a slew of flowers.   
He thinks, and it’s not the first time, far from it: it’s unfair. it’s so unfair. But the most unfair thing is, the flowers, with their sepals torn, their red, aggressive corolla, spread like that down the sink, are of a tragic beauty all the same. The most unfair thing is, their unrivalled white reminds him of His pale complexion, just as their boastful, arrogant side, and it taunts him; is, the image of Oikawa is engraved so deeply behind his eyelids he cannot resolve to throw it in the bin. Instead, he removes the plug and lets the tap run; for a long time. Then he uses the toilet.  
He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he does not hear someone suddenly coming in, in the break separating the second set and the third one, that he does not hear the water you turn on to overtake a much more worrying sound -- the sound of a deep cough scraping the back of the throat. Instead, his brows furrowed and still panting a bit, he grabs some toilet paper, dries his hands, flushes the toilet; and comes out to find, in front of him, Oikawa’s reflexion, Oikawa bent over that very sink, his back bowed, his hair unkempt. 

There is something falling from his mouth,  
a flower,  
so impossibly blue it carves itself on Tobio’s retina. 

When Oikawa looks up and stills, Kageyama can take a close look to what horror painted on a adolescent face looks like. “I didn’t see anything”, he says abruptly  – the only words that come to his mind. “I’ll be silent as a grave. I – oh god, I didn’t want to see this. I am sorry, I didn’t want to see this.” And when he sees Tooru’s silence, see his hands shake, he adds on an impulse: “I wouldn’t dare. I, too…  _ me too _ .”    
There is a silence, so long he feels like he is going to throw up, or die, or sink into the ground and be suffocated there without playing the third set. He isn’t sure the other boy got the message. “If you tell something, anything, I will kill you”, finally says Oikawa, and when Kageyama nods stiffly, he rushes out of the bathroom without looking back.   
It looks like he’s fleeing.  
Kageyama sits down on the yellowed tiles. His head is spinning.  

 

*

 

Later, he’ll research on the other flowers too. The ones with the weird hue, so turquoise you’d think they are artificially coloured. These are high-altitude flowers, from Himalaya even; blue poppies. Their petals are naturally crumpled and they produce small, hard seeds, almost grey, once the dry shell explodes. 

Without knowing how, Tobio realises these flowers are Iwaizumi’s, and the feeling of an immense solitude, with blurred, indefinite limits, overwhelms him. He can’t determine if this feeling is Oikawa’s, or hiw own. 

Tooru goes to highschool without them ever mentioning it again; Kageyama enters eighth grade, then ninth grade. He doesn’t die. The coughing fits become less frequent, then disappear. He’s the first one to be surprised. 

 

_ * _

 

He is convinced Hinata’s flowers would be sunflowers.   
It’s perfectly clear, it is obvious; beautiful flowers, gold and yellow, thirsty for sun, so big they would suffocate you on the first cough. Without giving you a chance.   
They have fought, they don’t talk anymore, training alone and minding their own business. He had never hoped to be the redhead’s friend, the sheer possibility of it had left him unmoved, and now, he’s oddly touched by the new order of things. He notices -knows, vaguely- that flowers should find their way out of his mouth, because he knows he has only felt so empty, so bad, one time.   
He doesn’t get it. Doesn’t try to get it. Soon Interhigh will be there. He sets the autopilot in his head and stops thinking.  
When he stumbles by accident on Oikawa and asks for some advice, with stubbornness, with relentlessness, he isn’t afraid; the symptoms have been gone for more than a year now. The other player snobs him, beats about the bush, and eventually answers him. Then, as he is going to depart -the young boy with him moved away- Tobio hears him whisper with an almost reluctant voice:

“How is your cough?... Better?”

Tobio blinks; is stunned by the words’ impact. Opens his mouth, and wonders what answer would be right. Because the question catches him off-guard, he tells the truth.

“I don’t know. I feel like I’m even less well-functioning these days.” He wrinkles his nose. “I… I feel all the feelings that go with the cough, but the flowers won’t show themselves. Does that mean they get stuck in my lungs?... Is it even worse than usual?”

A silence. Then Oikawa is bursting out laughing. But it is less of an mocking laugh than something deeply, absolutely, thoroughly  _ incredulous _ . 

“Tobio dear, you need to learn how to think. If you’re in love without all the flower thing, then it’s reciprocal. It’s better, not worse. What even fills your brain? Yoghurt? Or endless replays of volleyball matches? Or-”

He teases him some more, but Kageyama isn’t listening anymore. He is disconnected. Frozen. And when Oikawa decides to leave and wishes him a good day -noticing his ribbing doesn’t reach him- Kageyama barely answers.   
_ It’s reciprocal.  
_ The sheer possibility of it had never crossed his mind before. 

 

_ * _

 

He won’t tell Hinata he only found the courage to kiss him later -after the final, after the effusion, when they were still full of an intoxicating joy and he was walking him home- thanks to Oikawa.   
Maybe he eventually tells Hinata about the poor record between him and Oikawa, on the one evening they celebrate their four months together.  
Maybe Hinata sorts it out on his own. 

He isn’t sure.  

**Author's Note:**

> So *ok* I might have just written it only to 1) talk about Tobio and his crushes 2) shox the way I linked characters from Haikyuu! with flower language and symbolism. Oikawa goes with the poet's narcissus, Iwaizumi with the blue poppy and Hinata with the sunflower (yup, Tobio was right). I would've liked to put some other headcanons but it didn't fit with the narrative so I'm saying it now: Kageyama has the blue clematis, Asahi has bear's garlic and I gave Tsukishima water lily!  
> (If you leave a comment, feel free to mention it, I sure LOVE to discuss my headcanons)


End file.
